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New LCD monitor
0FINAL UPDATE: Ok, from what I can tell the issue is 99% Firefox's fault. I've been trying out Aurora (Firefox's beta) and it looks perfectly fine
UPDATE 3: I’ve been sitting on this issue for quite a while now, and I’ve decided that the best looking settings for my purposes (gaming/movies/internet) were to reset the Windows Color Management profile to sRGB and then set the monitor to sRGB (which disallows changes to most options) in the colour temp menu. Then I ran the Windows Display Calibration wizard, and it now looks quite normal.
Sometime I hope to get around to understanding the root of the problem, but it appears that it has to do with Windows 7 and its gamma setting. I should also note that it looks fine in Ubuntu.
This morning I took delivery of a brand new ASUS 24″ LCD monitor (VH242H) for $150 (can you believe it?).
So I got it from CentreCom, I’m not sure exactly why they were charging so little (though it was partially due to the $40 discount code on their Facebook ‘like’ page) but I couldn’t resist the temptation and I ended up getting one.
Amazingly there were no dead pixels, and it looks good.
It’s got full 1080p support, HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), HDMI/DVI/VGA Inputs and 2 tiny little speakers with SPDIF input.
Now I have 2 monitors.. I can “multitask” 😀
Here’s the link http://www.centrecom.com.au/catalog/vh242h-asus-vh242h-black-p-38468.html
Its at $159 at the moment, though I don’t think it’ll stay there.
Now of course there is an issue to report: there seems to be some aliasing (colours around black text) with both ClearText and Font Smoothing on. I’ve tried without, but it just gets worse.
It may be an issue if there’s nothing I can find, though I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be something on google that will help.
UPDATE: I took away the old monitor and its now normal.
UPDATE 2: Disregard my last, I still appear to have the problem, ClearType or not.
Derryn.
Random disappearances
0I was reminded recently about an issue I had many months ago. Back when I was building the HTPC, I had many problems to contend with.
Little did I know that these problems were all most probably caused by one (or possibly 2) pieces of hardware which I had dismissed as a cause because they were previously working fine, and so therefore had little reason to check them.
So here was definitely a lesson to learn from this: Always follow standard troubleshooting practise i.e. start with nothing and add devices one by one regardless of their flawless history.
Anyway the problem child ended up being the Leadtek PxDTV2300H PCI-E TV tuner, or rather TV tuners; 2 of them to be precise.
It really should have been a dead give away when it was the 2 tuners that disappeared from device manager. From what I remember, I didn’t think of it because of the LAN adapter (onboard) also disappearing/not working at random, thus throwing me off the scent.
At the time I was sure it was a motherboard failure or a PSU failure or even a problem with the RAM.
It wasn’t until long after I replaced the TV Tuners, the motherboard and consequently, the RAM, that I realised it was the TV tuners causing bluescreens, crashes, random device disappearances and general instability. I confirmed it when I put them both into my own computer and I started to get random BSODs and they also started removing themselves from device manager at random.
Whether this is a driver problem (very possible considering Leadtek’s history) or some kind of chipset compatibility issue (both machines I tried were AMD 800 series – 890GX and 890FX), I have no idea, or way of testing it. All I know is that both cards do the same when put together, as they do apart and no amount of driver changing or windows reinstalls helps.
So from all this I suppose my main point is this:
Always check any addon cards, AGP, PCI, PCI-E;
Check em all!
Derryn.
Media Control Chapters
0As 90% of my movie collection is comprised of DVD/Blu-ray rips, most of them are MKV files, also they include chapter points which Handbrake (the H.264 encoder I use) made from the original sources.
My intention was to be able to use these chapter points in Windows Media Center on my HTPC/Media-PC just as you would a DVD. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as that.
From what I could find out, the only way of achieving this is using a 7MC addon called “Media Control”. Basically it utilises the FFDShow decoders’ Remote Control API to inject remote commands via the remote or keyboard.
My problem (yep another problem =P) is that I’m using the DXVA version of the FFDShow decoder, which meant I had to duplicate the standard registry entries into it (no biggie).
Anyway, that seemed to work, it allowed to to fast forward at the very least, but for some reason it doesn’t want to know about the chapter points in my MKVs; the best I can get it to do is skip forward, which is the default action when chapters aren’t available.
So what I can deduce from that, is that FFDShow isn’t detecting chapters; which is funny considering when you right click it’s taskbar icon it shows them and allows you to skip to them.
I’ve tried reinstalling all my codecs, wiping every registry entry of FFDShow/media control. I’ve tried using the standard FFDShow codec, I’ve tried using Haali’s splitter, i’ve tried the LAV splitter.
Nothing worked!
I should probably also mention that I’m using Shark007’s codec packs on Windows 7 x64 -with both 32 and 64 bit packs.
It seems again that I am at a loss. It should work. No one else has had the same problem -not solved at any rate (from a LOT of Googling).
One day things might just… work.
*sigh*
Derryn